Dennis Monokroussos writes:
We continue our San Luis preview with a game between rating favorite and former
FIDE world champion Viswanathan Anand and current FIDE champ Rustam Kasimdzhanov.
In a recent rapid event, Kasimdzhanov gave Anand a run for his money in the
finals, taking the first game before going down by a 2.5-1.5 margin. But overall,
Anand has a huge plus (+7 –1 =3) in their head-to-head battles.
Kasimdzhanov vs Anand in the León Rapid Chess tournament in June
2005
This week, we'll take a look at their most recent decisive game at a classical
time control, their second game from this year's Linares super-tournament.
Kasimdzhanov, with White, repeated an anti-Sicilian sideline he had tried in
several previous games. It's a line with some bite – Svidler famously
beat Kasparov with it in Tilburg 1997 – but Anand was ready. Black equalized,
and thereafter the position took on a strange cast. White's position was okay,
but somehow, he never quite managed to finish his development. How Anand managed
to keep control, and almost imperceptibly increase his advantage and convert
it into a winning attack, makes the game a model of exploiting the initiative.
We generally associate that term with attacking play, but in this case, it's
an initiative in the service of positional ends first; only later will Anand's
positional trumps cash themselves out in a winning attack.
So join me this Monday night at 9 p.m. ET on the Playchess.com server for
a great game and the usual post-show banter. (But bring your own pizza.) Hope
to see you then!
Dennis Monokroussos'
Radio ChessBase
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Dennis
Monokroussos is 39, lives in South Bend, IN, and is an adjunct professor
of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.
He is fairly inactive as a player right now, spending most of his non-philosophy
time being a husband and teaching chess. At one time he was one of the strongest
juniors in the U.S., but quit for about eight years starting in his early 20s.
His highest rating was 2434 USCF, but he has now fallen to the low-mid 2300s
– "too much blitz, too little tournament chess", he says.
Dennis has been working as a chess teacher for seven years now, giving lessons
to adults and kids both in person and on the internet, worked for a number
of years for New York’s Chess In The Schools program, where he was
one of the coaches of the 1997-8 US K-8 championship team from the Bronx, and
was very active in working with many of CITS’s most talented juniors.
When Dennis Monokroussos presents a game, there are usually two main areas
of focus: the opening-to-middlegame transition and the key moments of the middlegame
(or endgame, when applicable). With respect to the latter, he attempts to present
some serious analysis culled from his best sources (both text and database),
which he has checked with his own efforts and then double-checked with his
chess software.
Here are the exact times for different locations in the world